Adventures in firmware
Well, that was fun. We’ve been having a problem with our wireless access point. Periodically, for no reason that we can see, it drops connection to all the cards. This is really annoying, especially to Janette, who’s home all day and uses AIM all the time. It kicks her off of her AIM regularly. Now, the web-based configuration for this WAP has a button to check for a firmware update. I’ve been using it regularly, and it always says that there is no firmware update. So, finally, today I decide to go to the bloody Belkin site myself, to check it out. It turns out, there’s a firmware update dating to Feb. 20, which predates us buying the WAP! Apparently, it’s been blatently lying to me about the firmware. So, I download it, and run the update.
Here’s where the fun begins. The firmware installs correctly, but the browser screen fails to reload. The laptops connect to the wireless (as in the lights on the cards say they can see the WAP), but the WAP is not talking to anything, wireless or wired. The lights are all on, and they all blink but no traffic shows up anywhere, and the WAP isn’t reachable either on it’s default address or on the one I assigned it. Bummer. So, I reboot the WAP. Nothing. So, finally, I reset it to factory settings. Success! It DHCPs the windows computer attached to it, on the default address. So, now all I have to do is copy the saved settings across to the windows computer (with no network. I actually used a floppy. 
) and restore the settings back to the WAP. Phew! All back to normal. Hopefully, the WAP will stop randomly dropping signal now.
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